Before Europeans arrived, the Americas had no honey bees at all
Honey bees now buzz on every continent except Antarctica, but the Americas had none in human times until European colonists brought them in the 16th century. Of roughly 20,000 known bee species, only a handful are true honey bees, and just two have ever been domesticated.
Honey bees belong to the genus Apis, Latin for bee, within the large bee family Apidae. They are eusocial insects that build lasting nests in cavities, fill them with hexagonal wax cells and store surplus food as honey, made by regurgitating digested carbohydrates. Those stores make hives a target for honey badgers, bears and human foragers. The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the one farmed around the world for honey and pollination; the only other domesticated species, the eastern honey bee, is kept in South, Southeast and East Asia. Some unrelated bees, such as the stingless Melipona, also make honey and have been kept for it.
The genus is native to mainland Africa, Europe and Asia. Its centre of origin seems to be South and Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, because every living species except the western honey bee comes from there, including the earliest branching lineages. The oldest Apis fossils, however, come from European deposits at the boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene, about 34 million years ago; that shows only that bees had reached Europe by then, and South Asian fossil beds remain poorly studied. The New World has yielded a single fossil species, Apis nearctica, from one 14-million-year-old Nevada specimen.
Colonists introduced western honey bees to South America in the early 16th century, North America in the early 17th and Australia in the early 19th. Social living predates the genus, as relatives like bumblebees are social too. Older Apis species build single exposed combs, while later ones nest in cavities with many combs, a habit that made domestication much easier.
People harvest more than honey: beeswax goes into candles, soap and cosmetics and into lost-wax mould-making, and royal jelly and venom are used, mainly in alternative medicine. Entomologist Robert Snodgrass argued the name should be two words, honey bee, since it truly is a bee, unlike a dragonfly.
Source: Honey bee
